Jakub Julian Ziółkowski

BORN 1980, Zamość

Julian Jakub Ziółkowski draws on classic genres of painting such as landscape, portrait, and the nude, yet art history and tradition are but points of departure for him, his works being filled with codes only he understands. Fantastic plants, mysterious structures of tiny elements, labyrinths – all these are evoked in his oil paintings, drawings, and gouaches. Ziółkowski has a degree from the Cracow Academy of Fine Arts, obtained in 2005 under Prof. Leszek Misiak. Since 2004, he has been represented by the Foksal Gallery Foundation, and since 2005, by Hauser & Wirth in Zurich in London. In 2008, he participated in the famous exhibition The Generational: Younger than Jesus at The New Contemporary Art Museum in New York.

untitled (Still Life)

It has been said about Jakub Julian Ziołkowski that he uses a “strategy of overgrowth.” His paintings are filled with characteristic lush plants, captured at a moment of dynamic growth. “Overgrowth” should also be taken in the less literary sense – the artist’s canvases are marked by a sense of horror vacui, a wealth of miniature elements, whether abstract or figurative. The painting depicts a tree whose roots have fractured the pot. The table on which the upturned tree rests is transparent, its edges lined with small white beads. The piece of furniture is illusory, whereas the roller blind by the upper edge of the painting is real. The viewer gets the impression that it could fall at any moment, obscuring the entire image.

untitled (Lying Figure)

Following his trip to Brazil, exotic grasses, twisting plant shoots, and small amorphous flowers began appearing in Ziołkowski’s work. This painting, however, is not a painter’s travelogue entry: the inspirations are only symbolic, filtered through the artist’s sensitivity and characteristic style. The figure represented is basically just an arrangement of body parts, their boundaries demarcated by beaded contours. The artist likes to use modular representations in micro or macro scale. He portrays the human body as it is shown in anatomy atlases, breaking it down into parts, studying and showing its structure. The work could be interpreted as a representation of the “primitive man,” living close to nature and organically connected with it.